Vincent op't Roodt M.A.

I am Vincent op ‘t Roodt, a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Göttingen, researching mobility rights through a socio-legal lens within RTG 2987 Mobility Rights in the Global Context of Multiple Crises. My doctoral work focuses on processes and practices of rights mobilization from below amidst and against the authoritarian re-articulation of the legal order within the EU’s Aegean border regime. I joined the RTG to deepen my legal research skills and contribute my own academic background in Politics, Sociology, Philosophy, and Peace- and Conflict Studies (Würzburg, Frankfurt am Main). With ethnographic fieldwork experience on border production, I aim to bridge critical theoretical perspectives and empirical research to advance a socio-legal analysis of the migration and law nexus. Alongside activist engagement in anti-racist and migrant solidarity networks, my professional experience includes human rights cooperation with and advocacy for Afghan activists at medico international (2023–2025) and co-authoring Terre des Hommes’ report on Afghan children’s flight experiences (2025).

Research Project

Working Title: Legal Practices in the Ruins of Law: Navigating EU Border Regimes from Below

Within RTG 2987’s Research Area The EU’s External Border as Site of Escalating Legal Conflicts, my project investigates how frontline actors – people on the move, activists, lawyers, NGOs, and solidarity networks – strategically navigate and contest the EU border regime in the Aegean. Tracing the effects of legal erosion and punitive policies (e.g., EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum and Greece’s 2025 draconian criminalization law), I examine how legal struggles adapt to violent border realities in a “ruins of law” environment. Employing multi-sited ethnography within a legal anthropology framework, I explore how solidarity networks produce evidence, document violations, and mobilize rights amid systemic human rights violations to reveal the potentials and limits of challenging the juridification of rightlessness.